


Armistice

by Basingstoke



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-03
Updated: 2005-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-02 17:43:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Basingstoke/pseuds/Basingstoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to Cesca for her beta. It took a while and a lot of work to get this one into shape.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Armistice

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Cesca for her beta. It took a while and a lot of work to get this one into shape.

"Hey, Doc," Sheppard said, and Beckett's eyes went very round.

"I thought I cleared you. Didn't I clear you? Are you injured?" he said, weaving a little on his feet. Sheppard understood; he was none too steady himself. But he'd been lying down for the past two hours, and he couldn't sleep.

"You cleared me. I'm fine. I can't sleep."

Beckett pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. "All right. My God, I thought I was losing my marbles there. What time is it?"

"Bedtime. Like it was six hours ago," said a woman in a Daedalus uniform.

Beckett glared at her. "Shush, you terrible woman."

"Bite me, you haggis-eating geek."

"Uch. Come on," Beckett said to Sheppard, waving indistinctly. "There's a cot in my office."

A bed, actually, hauled in from one of the bedrooms some time ago, currently covered in pill bottles. Beckett shook them one by one, tossing the empty ones and setting the ones that still held something on his desk. "Lay your head," Beckett said when there was enough space, and Sheppard obeyed. Beckett picked up a bottle and shook out two pills, handing one to Sheppard and tossing one in his own mouth. "Last week I wouldn't have given you that. We're running low, you know, on more than just coffee. But that dreadful woman filled up our cabinets, so sedatives all around," Beckett said. He sat down on the bed and sighed, then swung sideways in the opposite direction, propping his boots beside Sheppard's pillow and folding the crumpled blanket under his own head.

Beckett smelled like iodine. It was a good smell. It was the smell of hospitals, the smell that came after the drama was over.

The dreadful woman--who Sheppard assumed was the Daedalus head doctor--paused in the doorway. "So, if there's an emergency, I'll make sure not to wake you."

"Away with you," Beckett said.

"Nighty-night." She turned off the light and shut the door. There were frosted windows between the medical lab and the office, so it was twilight inside, letting Sheppard see the outline of the desk and the twitch of Beckett's fingers as they lay uneasily interlaced across his chest.

The sedative was kicking in fast, but Sheppard still wasn't sleepy. "I close my eyes and I'm still..."

"I know," Beckett said. He shifted, and his elbow overlapped Sheppard's knee.

Sheppard tried deep breathing. God, he was tired.

"They brought our mail. A package from my mother. I haven't had time to open it, but it smells like tea. A proper cuppa... it's been a while. I'm trying to get Bryta to make me a teapot, but she hasn't quite managed it yet."

"Wrong clay?" Sheppard asked.

"Wrong shape. It's the spout, see, she just doesn't understand what I'm getting at. They make tea from a powder like the Japanese."

"I have no idea how you make tea," Sheppard said.

"Well. It's quite a process to do it right. You need a kettle and a teapot and a sieve and proper leaves, none of that business with bags..."

His eyes closed. He was in the jumper and Ford was beside him and Ford reached out--

Sheppard jerked, kicking Beckett in the shoulder, wide awake.

Beckett resettled his elbow. "Now, warming the pot, that's key. You don't want to shock the leaves, you see. Nobody likes a cold shower..."

His eyes closed. He was holding his rifle, sighting on Everett's wasted face--

Sheppard twitched, wide awake.

"Clotted cream," Beckett sighed, "and cake, and scones, and biscuits, and honey, and proper jam made by old ladies in summer. Bread and butter, fresh butter from red Highland cows. Thin cold ham and mustard..."

His eyes closed. He was reaching out his hand, reaching out, because it was his wedding day and he had to meet his bride at the altar, but he kept walking and she wasn't there and the preacher had long white dreads.

When he woke up, he was reaching up the ceiling and Beckett was dead to the world, snoring lightly. Dreaming of cake, Sheppard hoped.

"On the day I proposed to Amy, it was summer," Sheppard said. "I had a day's leave and we got in the car and drove. We stopped in the middle of nowhere and had a picnic--sort of. Beer and frozen waffles and cherries. I think I must have been in charge of getting the food. But she liked it, or maybe she just liked me."

His eyes closed and he saw Amy flinching away from him. His hand was pale and hungry, mouthing the air.

He twitched awake. "I didn't have a ring," he murmured, "so I tied a clover around her finger." He saw the clover, her hand, her lips saying "yes." "And she left me after eighteen months because I couldn't leave work at work." Flinching away, saying "I didn't marry *you,*" and he couldn't blame her; his hands weren't lover's hands and they weren't gentle when they reached for her.

He could feel the pill kicking in. His limbs were like stone, too heavy to budge, but he could feel the gun in his hands ("Colonel Sumner was a friend of mine") because it was always there, a third arm, an extra organ. ("What I'm trying to say--I wish you had been there for me.")

Amy leaned over him, her hair a curtain around him, glowing in the faint light like stained glass. "I'm sorry. I fucked it up," John said.

"How could you fuck it up? We just met," she said.

"But I know how this ends," John said.

"It hasn't ended. You protected me."

"Okay, but--" He gestured with the gun in his hands.

She smiled down at him. "I chose you. You are perfect," she said, and she leaned down and kissed him hard, leaving blood in his mouth. "I choose you," she said.

"If you're sure," John said.

"I have known you since the moment of your birth." Her eyes were blue as the ocean. She was golden around him. And she was sure, and so he was hers.

He slept, his head in her lap, his gun at the ready, as she hummed to him gently, and he loved her, because yes, this was home. He was home and he loved her.

THE END.

 

All comments are welcome.


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